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Friday, December 14, 2012

Continuing on with my evil plan of converting my wife into a board game geekette. I picked up a copy of the Card/Dice game Elder Sign the other day, which I broke out last night. It’s the first real cooperative board game I’ve played, so I didn’t know what exactly to expect, it did in fact delver on a few hours of fun.

Our first game took just on 2 hours, with us stopping and looking up rules, so the timing on the box of 1-2 hours is right. The rules weren’t hard to pickup, especially with watching a couple of YouTube videos on how to play.

As usual with a Fantasy Flight Games, the quality is awesome, and the artwork is really nice and well themed. The text on the cards is fantastic and funny if your any type of gaming geek.

I drew a random Old One and ended up facing off against Hastur. (There are several Old ones to challenge). I had two of my Character die during the course of the game, mainly thanks to not taking notice of the amount of Sanity or Stamina I had left and concentrating on other rules. By the end of the game we had managed to come across most of the situations that involved rules. We managed to win the game, only just with the competition of the last task one turn before we would have lost.

Based on one game, it seems pretty well balanced, and has a good combination of cards to get replays. The items cards seem a bit light in the number, maybe a possible expansion in the future. (I don’t think there is one out at the moment)

An interesting game, that’s not to hard to pickup. I think I’ll enjoy the game much more the second and third times around now that I’ve got most of the rules sorted. The brain drain learning the rules does take away a fair part of the fun, so looking forward to getting our second game in.

There is even version of this on the iPad now, and a few apps for rolling dice etc.